SN Operations Research Forumhttps://doi.org/10.1007/s43069-020-0001-1
EDITORIAL

Open Access

Welcome to SN Operations Research Forum!
Marco Lübbecke 1 & Panos M. Pardalos 2# The Author(s) 2020

Operations research is a fascinating field. We have the entire spectrum from sophisticated and deep theories to applications that make huge impacts on industries, societies,
and the sciences. We cross disciplines, involving mathematics, computer science,engineering, and business/economics, to name only those at the core. We identify
and formalize new problems, we formulate mathematical models, we work with data,
we design and analyze algorithms, we implement software, we interpret and quantify
the impact of the solutions we create, and we accompany our research to see it shine inpractice. Operations research applications are literally everywhere. Despite this diversity, if we were to agree on the essence of operations research, it would be toquantitatively support decisions, an essential “technology” in our modern world.
When we editors were preparing the launch of this new journal, the SN Operations
Research Forum, colleagues asked us the obvious: why another journal? Certainly, we do
not need just another journal, but instead, we need publication outlets that are able to respondto the evolution we witness: the evolution of our field, operations research, the evolution inscientific culture, and as an implication, the evolution of the ways we share our research.
Number one is obvious. Operations research, as a discipline, is evolving, and it
always did. The most recent example is the synergy with artificial intelligence, machinelearning, and data science. While this constant change in topics and focus can be wellaccommodated by classical journals, they are more challenged by the increasingdiversity in what we consider a research result and how we share such results withthe community. Besides the original scientific article, we produce software for others touse, provide tools to ease the application of operations research, and blog about ourfailures or our projects, often also reaching a non-expert audience, explaining what weare doing and why it is worthwhile. We share data and results from our experiments,
participate in coding challenges, and produce educational videos. This development* Marco Lübbecke
marco.luebbecke@rwth-aachen.dePanos M. Pardalos
pardalos@ise.ufl.edu

1Chair of Operations Research, RWTH Aachen University, 52072 Aachen, Germany

2

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville,FL 32611, USA

SN Operations Research Forum

directly contributes to building a community for which we do not only send a message
unidirectionally, but help each other in forums, openly share, and provide, invite, andobtain feedback. And, we want to do this fast with immediate effects. This is why wefind many contributions on social media, on personal websites, on public software
repositories, on preprint archives—often enough only there. Imagine the librarians in ahundred years trying to curate today’s research output!
We certainly do not claim that we can address all of these items with our newjournal. But, we promise to closely observe and actively participate in these developments, and to offer as many aids to support the new needs as we can. We already know
today that we cannot accomplish this alone, but that this will be a community effort. As
the name “Forum” says, we would like to make this a place where the entire operations
research community can and will meet.
Here is the package we start with, that we expect to adapt over time. Of course, we solicit
original research articles, surveys, and reviews in all areas of operations research. We also
publish book and event reviews, short communications, trends and perspectives, and also
opinion pieces. Of large interest are formats and results that may have a hard time getting
published elsewhere: truly interdisciplinary works; articles that focus on the impact inpractice, also articles that describe the hurdles of putting operations research in practice;failed experiments and wrong paths taken to learn from; trends we see for the operations
research community, science, publication culture, and societal impact. Also, well-presented
science that is understandable to and explicitly addresses the general public. This could also
be in blog or video format. In fact, we encourage authors to accompany all applicationoriented work with additional material that explains the implications, significance, or impactof a result. We would like to publish descriptions of research software and how to build anduse tools. We would like to learn from and share experience.
We encourage contributors to make their work most widely accessible and visible.
Besides the optional additional explanatory material, this implies making all data
publicly available, ideally also the code, in order to help achieve reproducibility ofresults. If proprietary data cannot be made public, authors should provide additional,
synthetic data that support the result in the same way as the original data. We editors
collaborate with the publisher to provide technical support for hosting these supplementary materials, for example, on the journal’s website.
For some ideas, we do not fully know yet how to accomplish them. Think, forexample, of the concept of pre-registration of experimental studies (compare
https://cos.io/prereg/). In empirically working disciplines, one describes a study
before the data is collected. The experiment is evaluated (and accepted) solely basedon the relevance and quality of the research question. The later scientifically described
results of such an approved experiment will be published no matter whether theoutcome was positive or negative. We welcome suggestions for how pre-registration
can be rewardingly interpreted and developed for computational work in operations
research. This call for suggestions extends to how to install two-way communication onarticles, versioning of articles, and other collaborative and iterative approaches.
And of course, we need to talk about open access to research. Funding agencies,
governments, and the increasingly open research culture demand to have research results
openly accessible to everyone. The OR Forum is not an open access journal. Maybe it will
become one, but currently, we have a hybrid format, through which authors have the option
to publish open access, of course. Also, the content published in the first 2 years will be madeSN Operations Research Forumfreely available during this time. And even after that, the SN OR Forum will also be enabledwith the SharedIt feature, which all Springer Nature hybrid journals are currently equippedwith as well. SharedIt will allow anyone with electronic access to the journal to sharecomplete versions of any article with friends and colleagues for free in-browser reading.
We believe that this helps to rapidly disseminate new ideas and results. Even though all thisdoes not make the research results entirely free, researchers will be able to build on eachother’s works, regardless of whether their institutions have a journal subscription.
Finally, a word on publication speed. We start the journal with (only) a classical,
anonymous peer-review process. We know that good reviewing takes time, and we knowthat many in our community are overburdened with reviewing work already. We will not
trade speed for quality. However, the duration of the remaining publication process can bekept to a minimum. We assign every accepted contribution directly to an issue, and it willappear in final and citable format almost immediately after acceptance. Time will tell us
whether we should experiment 1 day with post-publication reviewing, which could increase
publication speed even more, but will face us with discussions about how to define andensure quality. Dissemination of research is and stays an exciting field!
Some readers may wonder why we chose to do our little publishing (r)evolution
with a traditional publisher. Actually, we were discussing alternatives that are fully
open and that are run entirely by the community. We believe in both. We also see that
future generations need to be able to access the knowledge and experience we produce
today. At the moment, we lack the imagination that this can totally be accomplisheddecentrally, given the increasing diversity of formats. A bit pathetically, you could saythat we believe that the publishing (r)evolution is possible, maybe even necessary, fromwithin the current system, not entirely replacing it. Therefore, we are extremely happy
that we found a publisher that is willing to (r)evolve with us.
We explicitly wish to thank the Springer Nature people behind this project, Marc
Strauss, Nick Philipson, Razia Amzad, and Matt Amboy, for their continued support,
enthusiasm, and curiosity. We are indebted to the many colleagues who instantaneously
joined us in this project to serve in editorial roles, in particular, Ilias Kotsireas forbecoming the Managing Editor.
This new journal is an invitation. Yes, of course, we welcome submissions of all
your work that you find most relevant to the profession and the community. But evenmore so, we welcome your ideas and your help. Your perspectives and views on thefuture of operations research, on the ways we can publish our works in a most usefulmanner, on the ways we give and get feedback on our research, on our needs as acommunity. We would like to create and develop this journal together with you, you theoperations research community. Let us do this experiment together. Get in touch.
Funding Information

Open Access funding provided by Projekt DEAL.

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